Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (51 page)

The whole family had gathered at Meyrignac; it was perhaps
because of this great upheaval that I remained unmoved by the sight of grandpapa's dead body, the house, and the garden. When I was thirteen, I had wept at the thought that one day I would no longer feel at home at Meyrignac; that day had come; the property belonged to my aunt and cousins; this summer I would visit them as a guest, and very soon, no doubt, I would never return there: but I didn't heave a single sigh of regret. My childhood and adolescence and the sound of the cows' hooves kicking the stable door as I leaned out into the starlit night – all that was far, very far behind me. Now I was ready for something else; I was all expectancy, and in the violence of this feeling all regrets were swept away.

I returned to Paris, dressed in heavy mourning, wearing a hat swathed in black crêpe georgette; but all the chestnuts were in flower, the tarmac was soft underfoot, and I could feel through my dress the gentle force of the sun. The fair was on in the Esplanade des Invalides: I strolled about there with my sister and Gégé, eating nougat that made our fingers sticky. They met a fellow art-student who took us off to her studio to listen to her records and drink port. What a lot of pleasure for one afternoon! Every day brought me something new: the smell of oil-paint in the Salon des Tuileries; at the Européen, there was Damia, whom I went to hear with Mallet; there were walks with Zaza and Lisa; the blue air of summer, and the sun. I was still filling the pages of my diary: they spoke unendingly of my new-found happiness.

*

I met Clairaut at the Nationale. He offered me his condolences and inquired, with gleaming eyes, after the state of my heart; it was my own fault for having talked too much, but all the same I felt exasperated by his inquisitive concern. He made me read the typescript of a short novel in which he expatiated upon the differences he had had with his fiancée: how, I wondered, could a cultivated person, said to be intelligent, waste his time recounting in such colourless phrases such tasteless anecdotes? I made no secret of the fact that I thought he hadn't any talent for writing. He appeared not to mind. As he was very friendly with Pradelle whom my parents thoroughly approved of, he came to dinner one evening
at our house and made a great impression on my father. He seemed very conscious of my sister's charms and in order to prove to her that he was no pedantic stick-in-the-mud he delivered himself of a number of witticisms whose ponderousness filled my sister and me with consternation.

I saw Herbaud a week after my return from Meyrignac, in one of the corridors of the Sorbonne. Clad in a light beige suit, he was sitting beside Sartre on a windowsill. He gave his hand to me and held it in a long, affectionate clasp, casting a curious look at my black dress. In the lecture-room I sat next to Lisa and they took their places a few rows behind us. The next day he appeared at the Nationale and told me that he had been worried about my absence: ‘I assumed that you were in the country, and then yesterday I saw you were in mourning.' I was pleased that he had thought of me; he set the seal on my pleasure by referring to the occasion on which I had seen him with Sartre in the Luxembourg Gardens; he would have liked to introduce Sartre to me then, ‘but though I don't respect Clairaut's philosophical ruminations,' he added, ‘I would not allow myself to disturb you when you are meditating.' He gave me a present from Sartre – a drawing which the latter had dedicated to me and which represented ‘Leibniz bathing with the Monads.'

During the three weeks before the competitive examination, he came to the Nationale every day; even if he wasn't working there himself he would come to meet me before it closed and we would go and have a drink somewhere. He was a bit worried about the examination; nevertheless we kept Kant and the Stoics out of our conversations. He was teaching me the ‘Eugenic cosmology' which derived from Cocteau's
Potomac
, and in which he had managed to interest Sartre and Nizan; all three of them belonged to the highest caste, that of the Eugenes, as exemplified by Socrates and Descartes; they relegated all their other fellow-students to inferior categories: among the Marrhanes who loll about in the infinite or among the Mortimers who slop about in the blue of the heavens: certain of them were very peeved by their classifications. I was ranked among the ‘earthy' women, the ones with a future. He showed me also the portraits of the principal metaphysical animals: the Catobelpas, that eats its own feet; the Catoboryx, that expresses itself in borborygmic rumbles: to this latter species belonged Charles du Bos, Gabriel Marcel, and the majority of the contributors to the
NRF.
‘Let me tell you that all thoughts of order are unbearably sad': this
was the Eugene's first lesson. He disdained science and industry and made a mock of all universal moral systems; he spat on Monsieur Lalande's logic and on Goblot's
Traité.
The Eugene tries to make his life an original work of art, and, as Herbaud explained to me, to reach a certain ‘comprehension' of the singular. I wasn't against this, and even used the idea to construct a pluralist morality which would allow me to justify attitudes as radically different as those of Zaza, Jacques, and Herbaud himself; every individual, I decided, possesses his own law, which is as exacting as a categorical imperative, although not universal: one only had the right to approve or disapprove of his actions in so far as they were a reflection of this personal norm. Herbaud didn't think much of this effort at systematization: ‘It's the sort of thinking I detest,' he told me in an angry voice; but the eagerness with which I had entered into his mythological fantasies secured me a free pardon. I liked the Eugene very much; he played a great part in our conversations: of course, he was one of Cocteau's creations, but Herbaud had invented some very charming adventures for him and he made ingenious use of the Eugene's authority against the Sorbonne philosophers, against order, reason, self-importance, stupidity, and every kind of vulgarity.

Herbaud admired three or four people this side of idolatry and despised the rest. His severity delighted me; I was enchanted to hear him pulling Blanchette Weiss to pieces, and I left him free to do what he liked with Clairaut. He didn't attack Pradelle, although he didn't like him; whenever he saw me at the Sorbonne or the Normale talking to some fellow-student, he would hold disdainfully aloof. He reproached me for being so indulgent. One afternoon, in the Nationale, the Hungarian student came over to me twice to ask, among other things, if one could use the word ‘gigolo' in the preface to a thesis. ‘All these people who come pestering you!' Herbaud said. ‘It's ridiculous! That Hungarian has done it twice! The same with Clairaut, and all your friends! You're wasting your time on people who aren't worth a second look. You must be a pathological case, otherwise there's no excuse for you!' He didn't mind Zaza, although he thought she looked too serious, but when I talked to him about Stépha he turned on me: ‘She made eyes at me!' He disliked provocative women: they were stepping outside their womanly role. Another day he told me rather angrily: ‘You're at the mercy of a whole troop of people. I keep wondering
if there's any room left for me in your universe.' I assured him – and he already knew this perfectly well – that there was very considerable room for him in my life.

I liked him more and more, and the pleasant thing about it all was that he made me like myself more; others had taken me seriously, but
he
found me amusing. When we came out of the Library he would say gaily: ‘How fast you walk! I love that: I feel as if we were going somewhere!' ‘Your funny husky voice!' he remarked another day. ‘It's very much your own voice, but it's husky. Sartre and I are much amused by it.' I discovered that I had a way of walking and a voice: it was something new. I began to take more care with my appearance; he would reward my efforts with a compliment: ‘That new hair-style, that collar suit you very well.' One afternoon, in the gardens of the Palais Royal, he told me, with an air of perplexity: ‘Ours is a strange relationship. At least it is for me: I've never before had a feminine friendship.' ‘Perhaps that's because I'm not very feminine.' ‘What! You?' He laughed in a way that I found very flattering. ‘No. It's more that you are so open-minded, you accept things so easily, and at once we are on an equal footing.' At the beginning, he used to call me, affectionately, ‘Mademoiselle'. One day he wrote on my exercise-book, in large capital letters:
BEAUVOIR= BEAVER
. ‘You are a beaver,' he said. ‘Beavers like company and they have a constructive bent.'

We shared all kinds of secrets; we understood each other almost instinctively; yet things did not always have the same effect on us. Herbaud knew Uzerche, where he had spent a few days with his wife, and he was very fond of the Limousin: but I was astonished when he discoursed eloquently upon dolmens, menhirs, and forests where the druids cut their mistletoe. He loved to lose himself in historical day-dreams; for him, the gardens of the Palais Royal were peopled with shadows of the great; but the past left
me
stone-cold. On the other hand, judging by his dry tone of voice and his take-it-or-leave-it manner, I thought that Herbaud was fairly devoid of sentiment; I was touched when he told me that he liked
The Constant Nymph
,
The Mill on the Floss
, and
Le Grand Meaulnes.
As we were talking about Alain Fournier, he murmured, in a voice that shook slightly: ‘There are some people you would have liked to be yourself'; for a moment he was silent, then went on: ‘Fundamentally I am much more intellectual than you; yet at heart, I find within myself the same sensibility as yours, though I
wouldn't accept it.' I told him that I sometimes found it intoxicating simply to be alive: ‘I have wonderful moments!' I added. He nodded: ‘I should hope so indeed, Mademoiselle; you deserve them. I never have any wonderful moments; I'm a poor sap: but I
do
wonderful things! ‘A smile took the bumptiousness out of this statement: but how far did he really believe in it himself? ‘You mustn't sit in judgement on me,' he sometimes told me, without my being able to tell if he was asking me a favour or giving me an order. I was quite willing to look upon him in a favourable light; he would talk to me about the books he would write: perhaps they would indeed be ‘wonderful'. Only one thing distressed me about him: the fulfilment of his individualism depended on social success. I was completely lacking in this kind of ambition. I wanted neither money nor public recognition nor notoriety. I was afraid I might sound like a ‘Catoboryx' if I used the terms ‘salvation' or ‘inner fulfilment' which often appeared in my journal. But the fact is that I still had a quasi-religious concept of what I called ‘my destiny'. Herbaud was interested in the figure he would cut in society; he envisaged his future books solely as elements of his personality. But this was a point on which I would never give way: I couldn't understand how one could make compromises with one's life in order to enjoy the dubious applause of a dubious public.

We hardly ever talked about our personal problems. But one day Herbaud unintentionally revealed that the Eugene is not happy because the ideal of insensibility is one which he never attains. I admitted to him that I understood the Eugenes of this world very well because there was one in my own life. The relationships between Eugenes and ‘earthy' women are usually difficult, he declared, because they want to swallow everything up and the Eugene sets up a resistance. ‘Do you think I haven't found that out already?' I asked. He laughed loudly. There and then I told him about my relationship with Jacques and he urged me to marry him; or if not him, then somebody else, he added; a woman ought to get married. I was surprised to see that on this point his attitude hardly differed at all from that of my father. In his view, a man who remained a virgin after the age of eighteen was a neurotic; but he claimed that a woman should only ‘give her all' after marriage. But I would not admit that there should be a law for one sex and a different one for the other. I wasn't blaming Jacques; but suddenly I found myself admitting that women should be as
free to dispose of their virginity as men were. I was very fond of one of Michael Arlen's novels,
The Green Hat.
A misunderstanding had separated the heroine, Iris Storm, from Napier, the great love of her youth; she would never forget him, even though she now popped in and out of bed with scores of men; in the end, rather than take Napier away from a lovable and loving wife, she killed herself by running her car into a tree. I admired Iris: her loneliness, her free-and-easy life, and her proud integrity. I lent the book to Herbaud. ‘I have no liking for women of easy virtue,' he told me as he handed it back. He smiled at me. ‘Although I like a woman to please me, I find it impossible to respect any woman I've had.' I was indignant: ‘But one doesn't “have” an Iris Storm.' ‘No woman surrenders herself with impunity to a man's most intimate embraces.' He insisted that our society only respects married women. I didn't care twopence about being respected. Living with Jacques and marrying him were all one to me. But in those cases where love could be disassociated from marriage, it seemed to me better to stake everything on love, and to hell with domesticity. One day in the Luxembourg Gardens I caught sight of Nizan and his wife who was pushing a perambulator; it was my ardent hope that my own future would have no place for that sort of thing. I thought it was terribly awkward that married couples should be inseparably bound by material cares: the only link between two people who loved one another should be love.

So I didn't see entirely eye to eye with Herbaud. I was dismayed by the triviality of his ambitions, by his respect for certain conventions and sometimes by his aestheticism; I would tell myself that if we had both been free, I should never have wanted to link my life with his; I saw love as a total engagement: therefore I was not in love with him. All the same, the feelings he inspired in me resembled strangely those I had for Jacques. Immediately I left him, I would begin to look forward to our next meeting; I used to store up for him everything that happened to me, everything that passed through my head. When we had finished talking and started working side by side, my heart would sink because already the best part of our meeting was over, and our parting was beginning to come in sight: I was never quite sure when I would see him again and this uncertainty saddened me; at times, the frailty of our relationship distressed me. ‘You're very sad today!' Herbaud would say gently, and he would do everything he could to restore
my good humour. I called upon myself to live this thing out from day to day, without either hope or fear; this thing that from day to day brought me only joy.